Sustainability-oriented macro trends and innovation types—exploring different organization types tackling the global sustainability megatrend

Abstract

The prevailing environmental and social challenges worldwide require comprehensive and sustainability-oriented changes in central areas of society—endeavors that call for more sustainability-oriented innovations. Sustainability can be understood as a megatrend within our society comprising sustainability-oriented macro trends such as Agricultural Innovation, Circular Economy, or Clean Tech. In line with this conceptualization, the current paper analyzes to what extent different types of organizations, such as startups and established companies, have been tackling sustainability-oriented macro trends and how much they have been focusing on sustainability-oriented innovation activities within their organization types. For the study, 758 organizations from the Trendexplorer database were examined through univariate and bivariate analyses. The results underscore that sustainability can be perceived as a key driver of structural change by illustrating that different organization types focus on multiple yet diverse sustainability-oriented macro trends simultaneously while concentrating on a specific type of innovation, whereby all three types of innovations (technological, marketing, and product and service innovations) can be integrated.